Tree Xu (b. 2000, Jinhua, China) is a London-based artist working across kinetic installation, moving image and research writing. His long-term project *Inhuman Horizon* examines how technical images shaped by war and violence settle into collective bodily reflexes.

 

Xu’s years of photographic training taught him to begin with the image as evidence. He asks how representation reaches us before direct contact with an object and changes what we later understand that object to be for. East Asian B cinema and cult culture inform his entire practice. Their practical effects and make-up (SFX) present violence through physical fabrication, a method Xu carries into his installations.

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The question of violence with its inertia also directs his research into modernity and present neocolonial conditions. Here, he traces how technology reproduces itself through colonialism and the periodic reactivation of primitive accumulation. *Inhuman Horizon* brings these questions back to the perception of “meat”. For Xu, re-enchantment names a perceptual stirring produced through a material encounter with the work.

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He holds a MA in Contemporary Photography; Practices and Philosophies at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, and a BFA in Photography at Communication University of Zhejiang. He was shortlisted for the 2025 Helen Scott Lidgett Award. Recent exhibitions include Arcana in London and The Garden of Libido in Guangzhou.